The view from Brittany

Thursday, October 24, 2013

There
have been a lot of bad news for Eupropean Green parties lately and it
must be said that those woes are not really undeserved. In Germany,
the local Green Party had commissioned Franz Walter and Stephan
Klecha, both of the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research to
search the party’s archives and clear it from accusations of having
defended pedophilia during the eighties. Unfortunately – for the
Greens – they proved the accusations were very founded and that the
Greens’ position on the issue was then a close approximation of
NAMBLA’s.

This
may have had an impact on the – disastrous for the Greens –
elections which followed.

In
France, the Greens are a part of the government. A few weeks ago,
their (not so a) leader Pascal Durand, "discovered"
that said government did not intend to do anything about the energy
transition and threatened a mass resignation if a few measures were
not taken. The Green ministers had a quick look at their paycheck,
decided they wanted another one, and convened that Pascal Durand
should lead the way by resigning from his leadership.

Needless
to say, this has slightly tarnished their already dubious reputation.

Of
course, the Greens are not the only ones to have defended dubious
causes back in the days. In 1977 a number of French pundits,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernard Kouchner and Jack Lang among them, had
signed a petition in support of three pedophiles, which hasn’t kept
two of them from becoming ministers in very un-green governments
later on. As for using one’s status as a minor ally of the
dominant party to get jobs one will later be reluctant to relinquish
even if that means sitting on one’s ideals... it is a national
sport in France, and my own party is quite guilty of that.

Yet,
the Greens, at least in France, embody those faults far better than
the other parties and are frequently lambasted for this, even in the
rather cynical political world.

This
is partly due to their drawing much of their support from the urban
upper middle class, who have no interest in changing a social
structure they mightily benefit from, but still wants to enjoy the
moral high ground. This is not the whole story, however.

As
Franz Walter stated :

Nature
conservation and sustainable development are not a fertile ground for
pedophilia and child abuse. The Greens, however, have a second agenda
which, curiously is not compatible with the first, a kind of radical
liberalism combined with a strong individualistic hedonism. In this
environment, emerged in the 1970s, before the foundation of the
Greens, the claims for decriminalization of sex offenses and a
tolerance of sex between adults and children. In the early 1980s,
part of this radical liberalism made its way into the Greens.

Nature
conservation was not, at the beginning, a progressive issue. The
project of the Enlightenment was to use rationality, and only
rationality, to deal with the world. That meant getting rid of the
influence of the churches but also establishing the dominance of Man
over Nature so as to create in this world the paradise the churches
promised us for the next. Note that does not necessarily meant
democracy. Freedom of speech and rationality could, and did, flourish
in an undemocratic context, such as Frederick II’s Prussia of
Joseph II’s Austria and most enlightened philosophers of the time
denied any legitimacy to the opinion of the people, opposing, like
D’Alembert, "truly
enlightened public" with "the blind and noisy multitude".

Nature
conservation did not come either from the first opponents of the
Enlightenment, the Counter-Revolutionists such as Joseph de Maistre.
Those rejected the rule of reason because it threatened the
(traditional) social order and undermined the dominance of the
Church. The other branch of counter-enlightenment, romanticism, was
totally different. It was often very critical of the old social order
and of established religion. Romanticists spearheaded the
revolutions and the national revolts of the nineteenth century,
opposing dynastic legitimacy in the name, not of rationality, but of
the peoples.

Romanticism
opposed not rationality itself but rationality’s claim to
supremacy. Romanticists valued the emotional and the atavistic, and
they certainly could not find that in the rarefied atmosphere of the
salons of the enlightened elite. Hence came their love for nature, as
well as for folk traditions and medieval tales.

This
yielded ethnic nationalism – which, at the beginning was the idea
that the common people,

not some enlightened elite, should rule –
but also a deep reverence for nature. One can find this ideology
among the Wandervögel, a German back-to-nature youth organization
emphasizing freedom, self-responsibility, and the spirit of
adventure, or in the agrarian conservatism of Tolkien, whose heroes,
please remember, are not princes but pipe-smoking undersized farmers.

Needless
to say this ideology was deeply illiberal and not very fond of the
mythology of progress.

German
romanticism, however, took a wrong turn during the nineteenth century
when the dream of back-to-the-land self-sufficiency got mixed down
with Austrian esoterism and racial mysticism. The end result was the
ideological cancer of Nazism and an apocalyptic war which buried
ecological concerns under the ruins and made sure that when they
would resurface, it would be on the left.

The
problem was that it happened during the late sixties, just as the
left, until them dominated by socialism, reconfigured itself. As left
radicalism was embraced by the growing middle classes, there was a
focus away from the concerns of the working classes toward hedonism
and individualism. It is not by chance that, in France, the events of
may 1968 began with a protest over the right for boys to visit the
girls’ dormitory.

These
ideas came, not from socialism, which was very ambivalent toward
individualism, but from classical liberalism, that is from the
Enlightenment. They, of course, continue its Messianic ambitions and
dellusions.

The
revolt of the sixties against the rigid post-war order was salutary
in many ways. Many injustices had to be redressed, notably in favor
of women, gays and racial minorities. Considering them like people
certainly was a great advance on the way toward a decent society. The
lack of involvement with the labor movement and the prevalence of
middle class individualistic values among activists ensured, however,
that the political organizations born the New Left would be liberal,
in the European meaning of the word.

The
Greens are one such organization and here lies the problem. As Franz
Walter said their two ideological engines are not compatible. You
cannot at the same time defend individualism and community solutions,
hedonism and sobriety, progress and sustainability. Sooner or later,
as with the Social-democrat parties, one of the two agendas will be
put to the back-burner or replaced by noisy tokenism. Since
mitigating the effect of peak energy is likely to involve very
unpopular measures we can safely bet that societal issues, on which
an agreement can be easily reached with Social-democrat parties, will
come to the forefront, along with those Paul Kingsnorth call
neo-environmentalists.
This is already the case to some extend. The French Greens have been
far more vocal about the Leonarda
Dibrani case than about the planned prolongation of the lifetime
of the country’s nuclear plants.

For
groups rooted in the upper “bobo” middle class, it is the path of
least resistance, and it is why it is becoming more and more
dominant, relegating the romantic vision and the notion of limits to
the fringes – and sometimes, it must be said, forcing them into
shady neighborhoods.

That
means that the Green parties will become more and more irrelevant to
our predicament and less and less likely to bring a constructive
response to the ecological crisis. In fact, they will probably delay
the emergence, at the political level, of a true political answer to
peak energy, free from the mythology of progress, the liberal
delusion, but also from the cancerous remnants of the völkish
perversion.

Yet,
this is what we must work on if we want to face the coming energy descent without falling into the same cancerous traps as German Romanticism

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

As
you probably don’t know, France is ruled by a Socialist
Party. Of course, this party is no more socialist than the
Institutional
Revolutionary Party is revolutionary. It is a pro-statu-quo party
defending the interests (and the self-righteousness) of the urban
elites and, to a lesser extend, of civil servants. Like all socialist
or social-democrat parties in Europe, it talks about social reforms
and implements a few societal ones, mostly aimed at its upper-middle
class clientele. Like all socialist or social-democrat parties in
Europe it is also a tool to select candidates to political offices
and distribute jobs and petty privileges to its members, a role it
fulfills in ever more conformist a way. In that matter, as in the
actual policies it implements when in charge, it is not different
from its right wing rivals.

Its
relationship with what is generally called socialism was rhetorical
from the start and is becoming more and more historical with time.
This, more than the Cuban or North-Korean carcinomas in situ
highlights the failure of
socialism both as an ideology and a political practice, even
within the ephemeral framework of our civilization.

The
word socialism was coined by Robert Owen, a Welsh entrepreneur with a humanitarian bent, in
1817 in a report to the House
of Common titled "Plans
for alleviating poverty through Socialism".
The
idea was to create communities of some 1,200 persons all living in
one large building in the form of a square, with public kitchen and
mess-rooms. Each family should have its own private apartments and
the entire care of the children till the age of three, after which
they should be brought up by the community. There should be perfect
equality of wages. In times, those communities would cover the world
because... because it was just so great, you know.

Needless
to say, the House of
Common was nonplussed, even
if it was to create, some 17 years latter, special houses for
paupers... in a very different spirit since they were explicitly
designed to provide worse working condition than the worst job
available outside them. Owen
nevertheless persevered, creating various communities, all of which
failed spectacularly. The best known of these was New Harmony, in
Indiana, which lasted only two years and of which Josiah Warren wrote
:

"It
seemed that the difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased
just in proportion to the demand for conformity. Two years were worn
out in this way; at the end of which, I believe that not more than
three persons had the least hope of success. Most of the
experimenters left in despair of all reforms, and conservatism felt
itself confirmed. We had tried every conceivable form of organization
and government. We had a world in miniature. --we had enacted the
French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of
corpses as a result. ...It appeared that it was nature's own inherent
law of diversity that had conquered us ...our 'united interests' were
directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances
and the instinct of self-preservation..."

The
failure of Owen and of its many imitators, notably Fourrier and
Cabet,, resulted in the marginalization of utopian socialism,
even though the idea of intentional communities still
survives
and enjoys, from time to time, ephemeral renewals of interest. These
experiments, which were numerous in America during the XIXth, century continued
the religious communal experiments of the past centuries,
but with a key difference. Unlike in Catholic monasteries or
Anabaptist communities, the main goal was not to get the faithful
away from the world so that they could reach salvation, but to set an
example that the world should,
eventually, follow.

In
that, socialism, despite what some modern authors such as Michea say,
was, from the start, a child of the mythology of progress. Itsgoal
has always been to end misery and inequalities through the
application of reason and the domination of Man over Nature.
Its main difference with what
was called the left during the XIXth
century was its attitude toward
individualism.

Neither
Owen’s utopian socialism, nor the two factions
which battled for the control of the first socialist organizations
(Marxism and Bakounine’s
anarchism), were particularly
high on individualism. This
should be obvious for Marx, and while Proudhon and Bakounine rejected
anything which remotely looked like a law or a political authority,
their vision of society looked nothing like Ayn Rand’s. To quote
Proudhon :

Under
the law of association, transmission of wealth does not apply to the
instruments of labour, so cannot become a cause of inequality... We
are socialists... under universal association, ownership of the land
and of the instruments of labour is social ownership... We want the
mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organised
workers' associations... We want these associations to be models for
agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast
federation of companies and societies, joined together in the common
bond of the democratic and social Republic.

In
fact, until the end the XIXth
century, socialism considered itself as a third force, without any
connection with the (then counter-revolutionary) right, but also with
the left, which was the party of change, progress and freedom of
trade. Even though socialism, in all its incarnations,
is clearly a child of the Enlightenment
since it aims to
free humanity from its
condition. Yet, it was ambivalent toward the cult of change and of
"innovation" so
characteristic of the left. To
quote the Communist Manifesto :

The
bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production,
and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old
modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the
first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of
all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed,
fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,
all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations
with his kind.

Marx
and Engels obviously did not consider this permanent disruption a
pleasant process. They did, however, consider it a necessary
stage on the road to socialism. To quote them again.

A
similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois
society with its relations of production, of exchange and of
property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of
production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer
able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up
by his spells.

In
short, it is because bourgeois rule is destructive that it creates
the conditions for the advent of socialism and humanity’s escape
out of history. It
is, of course, pure
premilenialist
logic, but, at least, it assumes that the atomization and permanent
disruption brought about by the Industrial Society is a bad thing –
the work of the Devil.

We
are light-years away from both classical liberalism and Socialist
Party members like Donique Strauss Kahn, who claims that "socialism
is hope, future and innovation".

Traditional
socialism was a critic of modernity, even if a flawed one. It came,
however, to ally with the liberal left at the end of the XIXth
century to keep the reactionary right to get back into power, at
least in Europe. In France it happened during the Dreyfus
affair. At first, French Socialist viewed
the whole thing as a "Bourgeois civil war" and refused to
take side. Faced with the real
possibility
of a far right coup, however,
they decided to allywith
the liberal left (then called Republicans, in opposition to the
royalist right).

The
result has been a gradual ideological absorption of socialism by
liberalism – and ironically the marginalization
of the liberal parties in all European democracies. This was by no
way a fast or smooth process. In France, where the Communist Party
remained strong well into the eighties, it was completed only during
the presidency of François Mitterand, even
though the trend was visible as soon as the late sixties.
Of course, this has been helped by the
Russian Revolution, the victory of which pushed traditionally minded
socialists onto the way to totalitarianism. Once it was associated
with the soviet cancerous nightmare, traditional, working-class
oriented socialism was bound to collapse with it, leaving the field
to liberalism, with its celebration of permanent change, progress and
its cult of the individual.

Of
course, traditional socialism was bound to fail. As I have said, it
was a child of the enlightenment and it aimed to get humanity out of
history into some kind of secular heaven. This heaven is certainly
more decent – to use Orwell’s word and concept – than its
liberal counterpart, but that does not mean it was ever possible on a
finite planet.

Had
the Russian Revolution failed, a decent
socialism, of the kind Orwell advocated might have established itself
in Europe, with both democratic institutions and
sharp limits to the mercantile logic. It would still have pursued
growth, however,
and would still have collided, with potentially disastrous
consequences, with the limits of Earth’s resources.

Marx
and Engels disliked Malthus, and not only because Malthus’ thesis
was morally abhorrent – it was, by the way. Socialism, as befits a
"modern" ideology as always sought to free humanity from
its historical condition, and that is impossible as long as resources
remain scarce. Marx,
like many authors of his time, thought scientific and technological
progress, would ultimately make scarcity a thing if the past. We know
now that it was a delusion. The fossil resources, which gave our
civilization, an unprecedented prosperity are being depleted at
an alarming rate, and it is only a matter of time before the amount
of energy availableto
our society begins to decrease in absolute terms – it is probably
already the case for net energy.

Our
ability to to keep our society working will decrease at the same pace
and
eventually,
our
civilization
will fragment and collapse, leaving
only ruins in the jungle
Whether said
society
is socialist, liberal
or anticapitalist is totally irrelevant to the process.

In
that respect, the eco-socialist ideologies which are being developed
here and there, are mostly attempts to salvage the messianic
ambitions of socialism, that is the very element that doomed it to
failure. Often, they amount to nothing more than saying that it’s
all the big bad capitalists’ fault, since
everybody knows that North Korea is a gigantic wildlife preserve as
well as a workers’ paradise.

This
does not mean, however, that
socialism
has nothing to offer the
future. It needs, however, to get away from dogma and go back to its
roots, that is the moral revolt against the destructive and
dehumanizing effects
of the industrial revolution, a revolt which was not that different
from the romanticists’, even if it had a different focus. This is
the approach of Orwell, Lasch and Michea, and
this moral indignation will remain valid long after socialist dogmas
will have be made irrelevant by
the fall of the industrial economy. This
moral indignation is not only an appeal to society being decent,
albeit if it also that. It is the refusal to let mercantile logic
invade the whole of society. It is no more a new idea than the
romanticists’ call for a re-enchanted world but socialism is the
first ideology to express it clearly.

Despite
its failure, at least in that particular civilization, it leaves a
heritage worth preserving and transmitting. The same way reason
should not be allowed to invade the entirety of a civilization’s
mental space, mercantile logic should remain strictly subordinate to
this civilization’s core values, and notably what Orwell called
common decency, that is the basic, unwritten but nearly
universal rules our species evolved to make life in society livable.
This does not mean, by the way, the elimination of private property –
which is the surest way to tyranny – but its subordination to the
interests and values of the community.

If
we manage to transmit this heritage across the coming dark age to
future civilizations, the efforts of generations of activists, no
matter how flawed and misguided they might have been from time to
time, will not have been vain.

But
of course, don’t expect any "socialist
party" to play any role in
that, they are too busy drinking champagne and celebrating "future"
and "innovation".

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Collapses
result in considerable cultural loss and there is no reason to think
that the coming one will be an exception. In fact it is likely that
the losses, in this domain like in many others, will be larger than
most. To begin with, we have more to loose. Fossil fuels have enabled
us to both feed and educate more people than at any other time in
history. More than two millions books are published world-wide every
single year. This is far beyond the capacity of a post-peak,
presumably agrarian, society to conserve. This is still more true of
movies or television films, which become useless once you have lost
the capacity to rerun them. Besides, our storage media have a very
limited lifespan and can only be accessed with energy-intensive
devices we are very likely to lose during the coming energy descent.

Where
medieval books are still readable after a century, our CDs, DVDs and
hard drives won’t survive ours and even if they do, they will be as
readable for our deindustrial descendants as an eight tracks
cartridge or a betamax tape is for the average westerner. When we
realize this, our first reaction is to follow the tracks of
Saint-Leibowitz and try to preserve as much as we can of our
civilization’s cultural heritage.

This
is definitely a worthy goal and some parts of our culture need to be
salvaged and transmitted if we want future civilizations to be more
successful than our own. As the Archdruid stated, ours is the first
technological civilization in history. Others will come and we must
make sure they are in position to build upon the foundations we have
laid.

Yet,
this strategy of transmission can disastrously backfire. Our society
is doomed to collapse because of its reliance on non-renewable
resources but also because, despite being aware of the situation, it
has chosen to ignore it. The Meadows Report was published in 1972,
when we still had a chance to establish a sustainable technological
civilization without paying too high a price. There are deep cultural
reasons for that, among which our obsession with “progress” and
the dominance of what we call liberalism in Europe, that is the
neutrality of the states toward values.

As
the French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa convincingly argued,
liberalism emerged from the XVIth and XVIIth
century religious wars in Europe. Having lived through a period of
highly disruptive religious wars. In a civilization where religion
held so central a place, such wars demanded an intellectual response
lest they tear apart the very fabric of the society.

This
response was liberalism, that is the idea that the state was to be
neutral not only toward religions but also toward values. Of course,
disestablishing organized religions was a good thing, as was the
creation of a private sphere, which allows people to pursue their own
interests without interference from the state. The logic of
liberalism, however, Michea argues, leads to the destruction of the
very notion of common values. Since all values are private and that
the community represented by the state shouldn’t favor any of them,
the only thing which keeps the society together is the relentless
pursuit of wealth and the merchant sphere ultimately invades all
other social spheres. Besides, since there is no common conception of
the common good, conflicts are decided through appeals to emotion,
hence the “oppression Olympics” and the shameless exhibitionism
which characterize today’s politics – the Femens are a case in
point but they are hardly alone.

The
availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuels definitely helped the
development of the progress myth and the slow destruction of
communities and of what Orwell called Common Decency. It made
possible for the progress myth to fulfill its promises, at least for
a time, which was quite an advantage over, say, traditional
Christianity. The enlightenment, however, is older, by at least a
century than the Industrial revolution and without it the mythology
of progress would not have taken hold and the transition to a
sustainable civilization far easier.

Collapses
destroy the cultural capital of a civilization, relegating once
dominant ideologies to the dustbins of history, erasing whole
philosophical schools. This is sometimes unfortunate. What survived
of classical Greek culture, for instance, was mostly the product of
the aristocratic party. We know very little of the intellectual
production of the democratic party and nothing of the anti-slavery
Athenian movement postulated by Karl Popper. We know also very little
of the competitors of Christianity during the 3rd century
BC. The arguments of pagan opponents of Christianity are known only
through (probably highly biased) quotations by Christian authors and
we know still less of the many heretic opponents of early
Catholicism.

This
can also be fortunate. When at the end of Bronze Age, the Mycenian
palaces were burnt by a bunch of unknown but manifestly very angry
people, the ideology which supported the palatial system was also
destroyed, not just discredited, utterly destroyed. The palatial
economy was a kind of proto-communism in which the ruler collected
the production of the areas under his control and redistributed it to
his followers. Resources were managed by a bureaucracy of scribes and
accountants who controlled also trade and craftsmanship in a
semi-centralized manner. Such a system was not very conductive to
democracy and personal freedom. It also tended to create a lot of
outcasts – the kind of people mid-eastern texts call habiru.

When
the system was destroyed, not only physically, but also as a concept,
the autonomous village
community which emerged from the wreckage, laid the foundations of
the city-states of the classical age and
with it of the market economy and democracy. Had the palatial system
survived, nothing of the sort would have happened.

Of
course, the present economical and political arrangements are
unlikely to survive the energy descent and
the current elites will definitely be replaced by something else –
probably in a rather messy and brutal way. This does not mean,
however, that the ideological apparatus they have built to justify
their rule, will not resurface during
some renaissance. That is,
after all, what happened when the Italian scholars of the
Quattrocento rediscovered Greek and Latin authors and rejected,
admittedly only to some extend, the heritage of the Middle-Age.

As
we slide down Hubbert’s curve, we’ll have to do some ideological
triage, burying that part of our heritage which has put us into the
mess we are in, and could very well put
our descendants into deep troubles should
they get seduced by them.

The
very idea of ideological triage will probably sound shocking, if not
downright offensive to the
average American. Europeans
tend to be less sanguine, however. We certainly value freedom of
expression and consider the free confrontation of ideas as
indispensable to the well-being of a decent society. We have also
faced, eighty years ago,
a cancerous ideology which very nearly plunged our continent into a
new dark age. So we have a very limited tolerance toward those who
try
to revive it.

The
French government has recently banned two small far right parties
after the death of a far-left activist at the hands of a skinhead. In
many European countries, denying the reality of the Holocaust will
land you in jail and very few
of us have a problem with that.

Indeed,
John Stuart Mill, whose seminal book On Liberty,
was instrumental in establishing the modern vision of freedom, stated
that "the only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community,
against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
That means that it is perfectly rightful to ban
ideas when they cause harm to
others. Please note, by the
way, that there is a difference between
harm and offense. Discrimination
against homosexuals clearly harms people. Homosexuality may offense
hardline Christians, it does not harm them in any meaningful way.

I
think it is obvious to everyone that Nazism
and its various fascist
siblings are harmful. So are
racism and homophobia, as
well as ideologies which advocate
infanticide and deny personhood to a part of humankind. It
is uncertain, however, which part of our heritage
is really harmful. While our
culture is doubtlessly cancerous, it
is far from being universally so. Our habit of treating women like
human beings is certainly worth bequeathing to our successors (but
not radical feminism), as
is our abhorrence for slavery. So are the rule of law (but
not the extension of law to the private sphere),
government by consent (but
not the trampling of common decency in the name of democracy)
and the equal dignity of all men (but
not the "ideology
of the same"),
even if those notions predate our civilization, or the concept of
representative democracy, which despite its flaws, allows for
democratic states larger than your average city-state.

If
the mythology of progress, which is at the core of the Enlightenment,
is bound to messily collapse,
some of its derivatives may
be very useful to a future civilization, and may even become a
permanent part of human nature – which in a species as ours is as
much cultural as it is natural. It
is, after all, what happened with the then radical idea that all men
are
equal in dignity. It arose from Roman imperialism, was formulated for
the first time by the Stoics and passed into Christianity then
Islam. While its implementation is still, let’s say imperfect, it
is accepted, at least in
theory, by everybody outside
the lunatic fringe.

This
handing down of the best of our heritage is not incompatible with the
burying of our worst in a
great pruning. In fact, it requires it, if we want this
best to become a part of
future cultures which will
have every reason to dislike us. Of
course, burying ideas does not mean burying those who hold them. It
means not saving them, not transmitting and copying them during the
coming long night and the
only fire we need for that is the one in our hearths. Lack
of resources and the necessity of survival will work for us in that
respect.By
simply focusing our scarcer and scarcer resources on what absolutely
needs saving, we will allow the harmful and the useless
to gently slip in the dark. We
must, however, be aware of what we do and
of why we are doing it.

The
cancerous memes
in our culture will bring us down. There
is little doubt about that, as there is little doubt that future
societies will develop their own, probably very different, cancerous
memes and
succumb to them. That is how
civilizations work. We must
however make sure that we don’t poison them with our delusions.

The
Necronomicon and The
Ultimate Resource are probably best forgotten, and
if that takes a little help...

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Mass
migrations, or more specifically mass culture replacement, is one of
the more troubling aspects of peak energy. Doubtlessly the
perspective of witnessing one’s civilization slowly declining is
nothing to be relished. It is not without its charms, however. Even though it
has been largely dethroned by the instant apocalypse meme, the theme
of decline was at the core of romanticism, the first modern revolt
against the industrial world and its disenchanted conception of
reality. It infuses, for instance, the work of Tolkien. Indeed, The
Lord of the Rings can be read as a long elegy upon the passing of the
old glories. It has always been a minority taste and I suspect the
rise of apocalyptic thinking has made it more so, but it has always
been present and it is likely that a significant part of those, who
care about Peak Oil share it. I surely do.

Envisioning
the complete erasure of one’s culture is another thing altogether. As social primates with a regrettable tendency to die before
our hundredth birthday, we often take some kind of collective as a
projection of our self toward eternity. The two most likely
candidates for this role are of course culture / nation and family.
We are aware that both can be changed beyond recognition by the
advent of peak energy, but as long as they survive, even if nobody
remembers us, the trace of our contribution to the history of
humanity lingers on.

We
know that culture replacement happens, and this knowledge has fed
apocalyptic fears of the Camps
des Saints variety, especially but not only in the far right.
Most of the time, they are the consequence of a rise in societal
complexity, whether it manifest through naked imperialism or through
the growth of trade networks. Periods of decreasing societal
complexity, however, often result in cultural fragmentation, with
previously well integrated areas developing their own autonomous
culture and identity, and the replacement of Roman political
authority by Germanic warlords during the fifth century did not
result in local versions of Latin dying out.

In
fact, it was the invaders’ languages and cultures, which
disappeared, sometimes very early. Gothic, Burgondian and Old
Frankish are all dead languages, while the inhabitants of what used to be
their kingdoms speak some form of (admittedly evolved) Latin. It is
easy to see why. The invaders did not move into a vacuum. Even though
the Empire was collapsing, at the provincial and local level, roman
institutions, and notably the Church, retained a lot of strength.
Even those barbarians which were not catholic (the Goths, Vandals and
Sueves, who followed a different brand of Christianity) were forced
to fit within post-roman society to control it (and harvesting its
not inconsiderable wealth). This doomed their cultures and languages
to extinction. Even the Franks, whose empire included Germanic
speaking populations, ultimately merged with their Romance speaking
subjects in what was to become France, probably during the ninth
century.

The
main exception, of course, was Britain. There, the invaders
(who were not really invaders as they had been hired) found not a
still functional post-roman society but a collection of tribal states
ruled by warlords. Roman institutions, including the Church, were
weak and the tribal conflicts frozen by the Roman occupation had
flared up again, leading to endemic warfare.

Of
those wars we know little but the ill-forts and the defensive
dykes,
which dot the West

Country testify of their violence. This was the
perfect environment for upwardly mobile warlords and for foreign
mercenaries, who, from the point of view of said warlords, had the
not so negligible advantage of not caring about local politics –
well, at least in theory.

A
few mercenaries became warlord themselves, setting up petty kingdoms
– Hengist,
for instance. Others remained loyal to whatever polity they served -
it seems it was the case of Aella, who according to the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle never assumed the title of king. Ethnicity appears to have
been pretty irrelevant to the politics of the time, however. It was
mostly a mater of tribal post-roman polities fighting each other on
old grudges and of powerful individual using the chaos to become
“kings by their own hands”.

Not
all of them were immigrants, by the way, and the early history of the
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms is replete with Welsh Kings. This was the case
of Wessex, the Kingdom which would later unify England (Cerdic,
Cynric,
Ceawlin,
Ceadwalla)
and of Mercia (Pybba,
Penda,
Peada). On
the other hands, Irish and Germanic warlords ruled what would later
become Celtic kingdoms. Stuart Laycock once suggested that the
legendary Arthur was in fact a Germanic mercenary called Earðhere, son of another Germanic mercenary named Uthere
Se non è vero è bene trovato,
as they say in Italian.

More
interesting is the case of Tewdrig ap Teithfallt. Twdrig, whose story
is related in the Book of Llandaff, was king of Glywysing, a petty
kingdom in South Wales during the sixth century. He had abdicated in
favour of his son Meurig and retired to live a hermitical life, but
came back to fight Saxon invaders. He was victorious but died a
short while after from his wound.

Curiously
for a Welsh saint, he had a fully Germanic name: Theodoric. So did
his father, Theodebald. Some people suggested he was a Goth, the
leader of a Visigoth fleet stranded in Britain after the fall of the
Kingdom of Tolouse in 507.
Nothing proves it, or disproves it for that matter. The only thing we
can say for sure is that he was some kind of Germanic warlord, who
had set himself up as the petty king of the Cardiff region.

Yet
the area was not germanized – no more than the neighboring Dyfed
and Brycheinog were gaelicized despite
having been founded by Irish warlords. The kingdom of Glywysing
endured until the Norman
conquest.

The
reason for that was probably that Wales had only superficially
romanized and was still a closely knit tribal society in which any
warlord had to fit if he
wanted to last. In the more romanized East, however, the eroded
tribal solidarity and the localized nature of the warlord’s power
meant that a culture shift could happen in a mere couple of
generation. There simply was no strong institution the native culture
could anchor itself on. Besides, the Saxons were mercenaries,
often of mixed tribal origins, which means they were quite welcoming
to any native boy able and willing to wield a sword., provided he
accepted the values of the band. That is probably what Cerdic and his likely numerous imitators did.

Immigrants,
even armed, powerful immigrants, are not conquering armies. They are
rather

destructured groups of
families and individual trying to better their lot. In a healthy
society, that means fitting in socially and culturally. Of course,
some amount of culture loyalty has to be expected in the first or
even the second generation, but on
the long run, assimilation is the norm. Tewdrig ap
Teithfallt is, of course, a
case in point.

In
a collapsing society, however, the best way to rise in ranks is to
use one’s community of family relationship as a leverage. This is
what the barbarian leaders of the fifth century, Ricimer for instance, did. They tried to
use their position in tribal societies to get charges within the
imperial power structure. Of course, in such a situation, playing down
one’s ethnic or tribal ties is counterproductive.

What
that means for us, fifteen century after the fall of the Western
Empire, is that culture shift is less dependent upon the number of
immigrants than upon the health of our society. Mass migrations are
pretty much unavoidable during the long descent which will follow
peak energy. As the USA and its vassals lose the power to prop them
up, the African and middle-eastern government dependent on them will
collapse, or at the very least lose the control of a great part of
their territory. At the same time European countries are bound will
be less and less able to stop the flow of refugees from the south.

The
goal of those immigrants will not be to create some kind of Islamic
Republic, but to better their lot. Of course, this will become more
and more difficult as the
economy contracts and the way to power and wealth becomes narrower
and narrower for those not born in them. It
will result in immigrants
choosing unpopular careers (which,
in France, includes the military) and
in sharpened competition between nativesand immigrants (and their
children) for low-paying jobs.

Naturally,
this will feed extremism on both sides, weakening the very fabric of
the society. In fact it already does: we
have had riots
near Paris after the Police checked a veiled woman, probably in
not so gentle a way. Needless to say, our elites’ behavior,
combining contempt for the lower class’ concerns, self-righteous
promotion of mostly irrelevant societal issues, and ambivalent
attitude toward the immigrants’ religiosity, doesn’t help.

We
may have islamic (if not downright islamist) warlords somewhere down
the road. We may also have anti-muslim pogroms or quasi-apartheid
policy. We may even have both, depending from the time or the area,
and both would be equally disastrous from the point of view of
cultural continuity.

Opening
wide
the gates of immigration in
this age of decline is
pretty stupid –
it makes the upper-middle classes feel good and
lowers
wages, which
explains why the idea is so popular among societal leftists and
laissez-faire
right-wingers are so fond of this idea. Now,
if you want to preserve some kind of cultural continuity –
and it certainly is a worthy goal – you
should better make easier for immigrants and
their descendants
to fit within your community. Their
chances of being ultimately absorbed will be greatly improved and
the skills they’ll bring will certainly help. Tewdrig’s
certainly did.

So
next time you’ll see an
immigrant
of north-african descent in a European street, remember King
Tewdrig... sorry, King Þeodoreiks
Þeobaldsunus,
in the hills
of Glamorgan, defending, sword in hand, his welsh fellow countrymen
against the Saxon hordes.

And
while you are at it remember that the leader of those Saxon hordes
may very well have been a native.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Just
before tearing itself apart about whether gay people should be
allowed to marry, France has gone through another political financial
scandal. This is not an uncommon occurrence. We tend not to care very
much about our politicians cheating on their wife, or even, like one
of our former president, having two families complete with a hidden
daughter. We tend to be less tolerant with embezzlement and tax
fraud, which does not keep them from happening with a troubling
regularity

In
this particular case it was Jerome Cahuzac a socialist minister, in
charge of the budget, who discovered to have a secret account in a
Swiss bank, for tax fraud purpose. Jerome Cahuzac being the political
head of French IRS, it was, let’s say, embarrassing. Of course,
Jerome Cahuzac was "advised"
to resign, both as a minister and a Member of Parlement. After
another round of "advices",
he has finally decided not to run in the coming by-election in what
used to be his constituency.

Politics
being what it is, the affair prompted a round of half-hearted
reforms, with ministers forced to disclose their fortune, then faded
out of the headlines in the wake of the gay marriage controversy.
This, however, only a matter of time before another scandal surfaces.
As I have said, those scandals are relatively common in French
history and Frenchmen somewhat expect their politicians to use their
position to get, if not rich, at least wealthy.

When
the regime is weak, however, or when the country goes trough a
crisis, this can lead to drastic changes in government. I don’t
think this will be the case, directly, for the Cahuzac affair, but
the general climate it breeds certainly will pave the way for it.
There are, indeed, certainly precedents for this in French history.

The
first to come to my mind is, of course, the Affair of the Diamond
Necklace, which prepared the French Revolution. In 1772, Louis XV had
ordered for his mistress, Madame du Barry, a diamond necklace
costing some 2,000,000 livres – a huge amount of money, even for a
king. Louis XV, however, died before the necklace could be completed
and Madame du Barry was
banished from the court, so the jeweler found themselves with a
hugely expansive jewel on their hand and nobody to sell it to, the
new queen having refused to accept a necklace designed for a
courtesan.

In
the meantime, a con-artist, Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, "Comtesse
de la Motte”, manipulated her lover, Louis René Édouard de Rohan
known as Cardinal de Rohan into believing the queen was in love with
him and arranged a meeting between him and the
said queen a
prostitute passing off as a queen. She then “borrowed” a lot of
money from the Cardinal, and bought her way into the high society.

She
was then contacted by the jewelers who wanted to use her to sell
their necklace. She accepted
and told the Cardinal that Marie Antoinette wanted to buy the
necklace; but, wanted him to act as a secret intermediary... this
worked well, until the Cardinal failed to paid the agreed upon amount
and the jewelers complained to the queen about him. Let’s say Marie
Antoinette was not amused.

Jeanne
de la Motte was condemned to be whipped and branded then sent to life
imprisonment in the Salpêtrière. She escaped, however and fled to
London where she ublished a book entitled Memoires
Justificatifs de La Comtesse de Valois de La Motte,
which attempted to justify her actions while casting blame upon the
queen. the Cardinal de Rohan,
for one, was acquitted.

A
lot of people where convinced the Queen had indeed a hand into the
whole affair and had used La Motte
as an instrument to discredit the Cardinal de Rohan. Rohan’s
acquittal, of course, did not help and the queen’s approval rating
plummeted,
with the consequences we all
know.

Another,
less known, example is the Stavisky affair in 1934. Alexandre
Satvisky was a French con-artist who
had managed to put himself at the head of the municipal pawnshop of
Bayonne. He used his position to sell worthless bonds, with fake
emeralds as a surety. He used his political connections to avoid
trial and continued his scams until December, when, faced with
exposure, he fled. The police finally found him, mortally wounded, in
January in Chamonix. He
apparently had committed suicide, albeit in a bizarre way since the
bullet had traveled an inconvenient three meters before hitting his
head.

He
had an extra-long arm, you see.

The
affair finally went public and grew into a full-blown scandal,
leading to the resignation of premier Camille Chautemps from the
Radical-Socialist Party (which was neither radical nor socialist, by
the way). His successor Édouard Daladier, dismissed the prefect of
the Paris police, more to the right than Atilla the Hun Jean Chiappe.
The result was a violent demonstration which degenerated into a coup
attempt by various far right organizations such as the Action
Française, the Croix-de-Feu and the Mouvement Franciste. Fourteen
people were killed in the night of 6–7 February 1934. The Republic
survived, barely, but but Daladier had to resign and the left faced
with an
immediate threat from the far right united,
which led to the 1936 victory of the Popular Front.

The
Stavisky affair also triggered the founding of a far right terrorist
organization La Cagoule
an a general erosion of democratic values which would pave the way
for the Vichy regime.

Of
course, nobody has tried to storm the parliament in the wake of the
Cahuzac affair. Its effects are more insidious but can be every bit
as deleterious.

France
is indeed facing a two-pronged long-term crisis which is slowly but
surely destroying its social cohesiveness. Like all human societies,
it suffers from the systemic effects of peak energy and peak
complexity.

As
the amount of net energy available to the society shrinks, it becomes
less and less able to both maintain its infrastructure and actually
do things. The result is that our infrastructures, both material and
immaterial, decay, as does
our ability to effect positive change. Besides,
our usual ways of dealing with problems, that is increasing the
complexity of the society, is becoming more and more
counterproductive.

As
always, in such a situation, the top tiers of the society, preserve
their position by grabbing
resources from those located
lower in the hierarchy. In democracies,
this mostly done in indirect ways, by dismantling institutions which
benefit mostly the lower and middle strata of society: welfare,
public education and services, collective transportation, subsidized
medicine...

Moreover,
we are slowly losing our privileged position as a first circle ally
of the current world hegemon. Not only are the United States losing
ground to China, but the center of world economic activities is
drifting away from the
Atlantic, making us more and more peripheral in world affairs. That
means that our ability to profit from the imperial system set up by
the USA (and from the remnants of our own Empire) is slowly
dwindling.

In
such a situation, elections become more and more about gay marriage
and the legalization of marijuana and less and less about wages and
taxes. Mainstream politics sound then more and more like empty noises
to the working class and to a
significant part of the middle class.

This
creates a disconnect between the population and the political class
which grows more and more parasitical as the resources of the society
diminish. This disconnect is bound to increase as various elites are
forced into resource grabbing by the shrinking economy and
competition between the various strata of the society sharpens.

In
normal times, scandals, even though they can end the career of the
politicians involved in them, do not undermine the legitimacy of the
regime. Neither the Panama
Scandals nor the Oil
Sniffers Hoax or the Urba
Affair threatened the survival of the Republic because, outside
far right circles, they were seen as bugs, not as features. Globally,
the system worked, and even if you disagreed with the party in power,
you could hope for things to get done your way once your pet team in
the government.

The
problem is that it does not longer work that way. Our economies
cannot function without a solid growth, which is more and more
becoming a thing of the past. As the governments lack the means to do
anything but further the status quo, the policies of the left
become indistinguishable from those of the right and their ideology
focus away on societal issues to preserve the fake dichotomy so
central in our political system.

Of
course, people are not fooled and see more and more their political
class not as the promoters of such or such policies but as
professionals fighting to advance their career. It becomes, by the
way, more and more true, as the younger generation of politicians
internalize the constraints of the system and focus on secondary,
bobo, issues such as feminism or voting right for foreigners.

In
such a situation, careerism, greed, and ultimately corruption become
features of a political system more and more cut off from the
day-to-day realities. Outright fraud remains rare, but privileges
abound. I certainly enjoy some of them despite my low status and my
position as an outsider, even though the main one – I can’t be
fired – come not from my being a politician but from being a civil
servant.

The
occasional scandal will then be considered by a large part of the
population as the proof that the whole political class is corrupt and
that only extremists are sincere. In 1780, that ultimately meant the
Jacobins. In 1934, that meant the Communists or the various far right
sects which would later founded the Vichy regime. Now, it meant
caesarist parties such as the French National Front or Populist /
leftist ones such as Mélenchon’s Parti de Gauche.

That
makes corruption far more dangerous than in more prosperous times as
it increase the already strong preference of our declining societies
for authoritarianism. Fueled by an ever growing thirst for an
effective political action, but similarly lacking in means, this
authoritarianism won’t be less corrupt than its democratic rivals.
In fact, it may be more, despite a few show-trials, because of a
greater control of judicial institutions by the government –
corruption-ridden China is a case in point. It will also be less
efficient at mobilizing remaining resources since its legitimacy will
be based not on its origin but on its supposed ability to solve the
problems faced by the society, something it will be very unlikely to
be be able to do.

What
authoritarianism will do, however, is destroy what will be left of
the democratic tradition and replace it with a mythology of
charismatic leadership which will pave the way for warlords later in
the game. This can be disastrous. Democracy as an idea is probably
going to survive or at least to be revived at some point, unless we
lose writing, which is quite unlikely. Democratic tradition at the
local level, however, with the network of associations and local
institutions it depends, would be shattered by a period of brutal
authoritarianism.

This
is why it is vital for the future to eliminate corruption as much as
possible, and to reduce, as much as possible again, the privileges of
the political class. It’s not because they are bad - they are, but
it is inevitable that the political class grabs some privilege and
that some of its members go over to the dark side : that’s what
human do. It’s because they reinforce a trend already strong in all
declining societies which leads to runaway resource grabbing by
self-appointed elites which would make the present political class
almost competent and responsible in comparison.

We
need to go robespierrian on corruption, lest a new Robespierre shows
up.